Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (65 page)

Love, to Victor, is insanity.

We stop before a locked door.

“I will wait outside,” says the nun. “Knock on the door when you are done.” She produces a large iron key from a belt around her waist and unlocks the door for me.

The room is small. There is a barred window at one end, a bed along the wall, a wash basin against the other wall. The sparse furnishings remind me of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and I have to work hard to suppress a memory of Adèle lying naked on the bed there.

Little Adèle resembles her mother. She has the same dark hair and strong features. She sits in a rocking chair by the window, her head bent over a book. She looks up when the door closes behind me.

“Adèle,” I say, “I am Charles. Your godfather.”

She stares at me blankly. I move towards her and she shrinks away.

“Keep to your side of the room,” she says.

I do.

“Charles,” I say again. “I used to come to your house. I knew you when you were a little girl. I was a friend to your mother.”

At the mention of her mother, Adèle’s face brightens. “Maman,” she says. “What will we do today, Maman?”

“I’ve brought you some things.” I carefully hand over a copy of
Livre d’amour
. “This is a book of my poetry. Some of the poems are about you.” As Adèle takes the volume, I see, on the floor by her chair, a pile of small pieces of paper and the empty covers of another book.
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo.

“I look forward to them,” she says, quite lucidly, giving no clue as to whether she plans to read my poems or shred them.

“And I have this for you.” I reach into my coat pocket and bring out the square of lace, untie the ribbon, and shake out the veil. “It was your mother’s. She gave it to me once. I wanted to bring it for you. I thought you should have it.”

Adèle takes the wedding veil, carefully examining the lacework with her long, slender fingers. She has her mother’s hands, but her concentrated gaze is entirely Victor’s. How could he ever have doubted that she was his?

Adèle arranges the veil over her head, making sure there is an equal length of lace hanging down both sides of her face.

“Am I pretty?”

“Very.”

My legs are tired from the walk and the climb up the asylum stairs. I have been trying to present a calm demeanour to Adèle, but I suddenly feel overwhelmed.

“May I sit?” I ask. “I have come a long way.”

Adèle waves a hand towards her single bed, and I perch on the edge of it. I can feel the metal frame through the thin mattress.

“Is Maman coming soon?” she asks.

I don’t know what to say, so I lie. “Yes. Soon.”

“And are you really Charles?”

“Yes.”

Adèle closes her eyes and rocks in her chair for a moment. “Charles,” she says. “Charles is coming to see me. Let’s open the windows, children, so that I can hear his little footsteps on the pavement.” She opens her eyes, looks straight at me.

I think of myself hurrying towards the Hugo house on Notre-Dame-des-Champs, tripping over the cobblestones in my rush to get to Adèle. And I think of her waiting, perfectly still, by the open window in the drawing room, listening for the slightest scuff of my shoes on the street.

I cannot help myself. I weep into my hands.

The rocking chair stops whispering against the floor. I hear Adèle’s footsteps, then the creak of the bed frame as she sits down beside me. Her tentative hand finds mine.

“Will you take me to the orchard again?” she says. “As you did when I was a little girl?”

Her skin feels cool. I hold on to her hand like a drowning man.

“Of course,” I say. “Of course.”

I don’t know if this is possible, but I will try. I will talk to the matron on my way out, see if I can arrange this for the next time I come to visit Adèle.

“You remember the orchard?” I ask.

“You would sit with Maman,” says Adèle, “on the bench by the trees. Holding her hand, just like this. I would sit on the ground by your legs. And we were all very happy. The end.”

I walk home from the asylum through the orchard in the Jardin du Luxembourg. They are changing the way they grow the fruit here. The trees are now espaliered, each one trained carefully to grow its fruit in straight lines.

An apple tree lives roughly as long as a man. The trees that Adèle and I walked through are now nearing the end of their lives. They are twisted and gnarled, their leaves gone from the winter winds, their limbs crashed to the ground. The orchard is littered with these broken branches. The limbs of the old apple trees grow straight out, eventually becoming too heavy for the trunk to bear. They have dropped off and lie beneath the trees intact. It seems more like an amputation than a natural winnowing.

The new trees, with their perfect controlled shapes, grow among the old, wild trees.

The ground is cobbled with fallen fruit. But high up in one of the trees, high up in the branches, a single winter apple still clings tightly to the bough.

F
OR THEIR BELIEF
in this book, and their work and help to make it better, I would like to thank my agent, Clare Alexander, and my editor, Phyllis Bruce. I am more than grateful for their wisdom, acumen, and guidance—not to mention patience—during the writing of this novel.

I would like to thank Mark Siemons at Altair Electronics for computer triage above and beyond the call.

Martine Bresson translated the letters from George Sand to Sainte-Beuve. The translations of Sainte-Beuve’s poetry are my own.

Professor Julie Kane generously let me read her translations of Victor Hugo’s poems to his daughter, Léopoldine.

Special thanks to my former agent, the late Frances Hanna, who was the first reader of this novel.

A portion of this novel first appeared in the journal
Queen’s Quarterly
in 2008.

The title of the novel is a translation of the following quote from Rimbaud: “
Il
faut réinventer l’amour
.”

So much of the novel, and my life, has been made possible by the following people: Mary Louise Adams, Tama Baldwin, Megan Boler, Elizabeth Christie, Craig Dale, Carol Drake, Sue Goyette, Elizabeth Greene, Anne Hardcastle, Heather Home, Cathy Humphreys, Frances Humphreys, Michelle Jaffe, Paul Kelley, Hugh LaFave, Walter Lloyd, Susan Lord, Eleanor MacDonald, Bruce Martin, Jennie McKnight, Daintry Norman, Joanne Page, Anne Peters, Mike and Suzanne Ryan, Su Rynard, Glenn Stairs, Ray and Lori Vos.

Thanks to Mary Louise Adams for her abiding friendship and unfailing optimism.

Thanks to Elizabeth Christie for coming to my rescue; and to Sue Goyette and Joanne Page for keeping the faith.

Before we knew he was dying, my brother, Martin, came with me on a research trip to Paris, for which I will always be grateful.

And lastly, I would like to thank Nancy Jo Cullen, who has reinvented love for me.

“Compelling and poignant…. This is a novel that’s authentic to the point of feeling raw.”
—Calgary Herald

“Humphreys has never written about love with such ferocity…. Her poetry is still on full display in rhapsodic sequences about desire, spectacular descriptions of Paris … and her account of the heartbreaking restrictions of 19th-century social convention.”
—NOW magazine (Toronto)

“Reverberates with beautiful language and Humphreys’s trademark knack for balancing surprising notes of humour and lightness with poignant descriptions of hardship, loss, and suffering.”
—Quill & Quire
”

A compelling and emotionally rich new historical novel.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“An engaging novel, told with wit and imagination.”
—Financial Times

Coventry

The Frozen Thames

Wild Dogs

The Lost Garden

Afterimage

Leaving Earth

S
AINTE
-B
EUVE DIED ON
O
CTOBER
13, 1869, from complications following bladder surgery. The physical condition that defined his love affair with Adèle—first identified while he was at medical school, and later written about in his diaries—helped bring about his death.

Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885, outliving both his sons by more than a decade. Adèle Hugo remained in the Paris asylum for over forty years, dying there at the age of eighty-five, in 1915, the last surviving child of Victor and Adèle.

With few exceptions, the events in my novel mirror actual events. Where possible, I have used the words of Sainte-Beuve, Adèle, and George Sand.

Of the many original and secondary sources that were used in the writing of this book, I would like to especially acknowledge Harold Nicolson’s biography of Sainte-Beuve, and I express my gratitude to the archivists at Princeton University for allowing me access to the notes he made while at work on this book.

How did you become interested in writing historical fiction?

History was my favourite subject in school. I was, and still am, fascinated by the story behind something, the origins of objects and events. It seemed a natural fit to combine my interest in writing with my interest in history. I like the educational aspect of writing about the past, the fact that the learning curve is quite intense, that there is always something more to learn.

Do you usually begin a novel with a character, or a time period, or a question?

It depends on the book. I have begun with a question more often than not, but for
The Reinvention of Love
I began with the character of Charles Sainte-Beuve. I was interested in him partly because he was such a complex man and had, within him, many contradictory traits. He was, for example, devoted and loyal, and yet he also possessed a boastful nature. Those two aspects often didn’t work very well together and got him into trouble. I liked those contradictions in his character, how he was his own worst enemy.

This, and the fact of the love affair with Adèle Hugo, was what got me thinking about the novel.

Do you ever have to rein in your imagination to avoid deviating from the true story?

Sometimes it’s the opposite—I have to leave out real details because people just wouldn’t believe they were true, even though they are. Real life is always, as the saying goes, much stranger than fiction.

How do you stay true to the record while making the characters your own?

These were real people. They existed. I feel it wouldn’t be fair to make up anything about them. Where there is a voice, as there was with Sainte-Beuve because of his writings, I try to stay true to that voice. Where there is recorded action, I try to stay true to those actions.

Pretty much everything in
The Reinvention of Love
actually happened, and happened as I wrote it. The only thing that I took liberties with was Sainte-Beuve’s end. In real life, it was a painful and miserable one. I gave him a better ending than he had, but I don’t believe he would have minded.

How much of a role do your own feelings, positive or negative, about a real person play in your writing about them?

Even with wholly unlikable characters, there must be something that I can sympathize with in order for me to be able to write well about them. I never entirely like or dislike a character, and quite frankly, the more complicated they are, the more interesting it is to write about them.

Probably the character I liked least in
The Reinvention of Love
was Victor Hugo. He was a tyrant, and it’s hard to like a tyrant; but I did sympathize with his obsessive dedication to his work. I know what it feels like to work hard and be completely wrapped up in it, so I didn’t completely dislike him, although I found his cavalier attitude towards his loved ones reprehensible.

Despite this, are you an admirer of Hugo’s novels and plays?

I’m afraid my opinion of Hugo is much the same as Charles’s opinion. I think that Hugo was a writer very in touch with his time. His mix of politics and romanticism was a heady one, and his passion for writing and rampant productivity was impressive. I understand why he was beloved in his day. It is usually the writers who are most in touch with their time that achieve the best success within it, although their writing may feel dated a hundred years hence. I like some of Hugo’s novels, particularly
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
, but I don’t care much for his plays or his poetry.

Why did you decide to translate some of Sainte-Beuve’s poetry yourself?

I did so, at first, because it was a way to find out more about the love affair between Charles and Adèle. To have access to Sainte-Beuve’s actual voice by way of the poems was fantastic. So I was translating for information, for details of their affair. But quite quickly I got a feel for his voice, and during the six months that I spent translating the poems, I came to really like and understand that voice. In retrospect, I can see it was the perfect way into the novel. It’s as though translating the poems was a rehearsal for writing the prose.

Do you find it satisfying to bring to life on the page historical individuals that most readers wouldn’t otherwise know much about?

One of the reasons I wanted to write about this love affair is that it has been buried and discounted in an effort to protect the reputation of Victor Hugo. History favours great men, not women, and not a man like Sainte-Beuve, whom many did not consider to be a “real” man. I wanted to take the affair—and the persons of Charles and Adèle—out from under the shadow of Victor Hugo. I wanted to deal with their love affair on their terms, not his, and from their experience, not his. I wanted to examine their motives, their words, their deeds, their feelings. I wanted the light that still shines on Victor Hugo to shift over, just for a moment, and shine on them.

You wrote with sensitivity about Charles’s hermaphroditism and dressing as a woman, subjects that could have tipped into sensationalism or humour. How did you achieve the right tone?

I stayed as close as possible to Charles’s own voice—the voice I found in his poems and essays and diaries. I felt I had an understanding of him, of how he would behave in most situations, and I wrote from that understanding. It was challenging, but that made it more interesting to do, and I liked the stretch of imagination that it required.

In a review of
The Reinvention of Love
, Donna Bailey Nurse of
The Globe and Mail
wrote of you that “there was never a novelist so averse to inhabiting the space between her characters and her readers.” How conscious of this are you as you write?

When I write as a character I try to disappear into that character, to make my actual self invisible, and I suppose that is what the reviewer means. This is how I write, how I can make the story real to myself so that it appears real to my readers. I don’t know how to write any other way.

What do you think your readers would find most surprising about a writer’s life?

How boring it is, I think. I need routine in order to create, to delve into my imagination. I need things to be as stable and consistent as possible. This translates into days of very low-key activities, such as walking the dog and reading, in order to fully sink into my work.

What aspects of creating a novel and sharing it with readers do you find most challenging? What do you find most appealing?

Increasingly, I find being away from home difficult. An author tour seems like a nice thing—staying in hotels, visiting different cities—but it is oddly dislocating and, for an introvert such as myself, exhausting. I like readings and meeting my readers, but I probably prefer the research and writing end of things. It’s exciting to follow an idea, to chase information down, to write in the heat of creating a new story.

Tell us what we can expect next from Helen Humphreys.

My memoir about the death of my brother,
Nocturne
, is coming out in the spring of 2013. And I’m at work on a new novel.